The First Oculus Rift Developer Kits May Start Shipping Tomorrow

The good news is that the first batch of Oculus Rift developer kits may finally start shipping to Kickstarter backers this Monday, the not so good news is that there will not be a Doom 3 BFG Edition copy supporting the Rift bundled as it was previously announced. The reason for that is that DOOM 3 BFG Edition will not support the Rift development kit by the time the kits begin shipping. So instead the team at Oculus is offering a few alternative options in the form of replacement awards instead of DOOM 3 BFG.

Replacement Rewards:

– $20 Steam Wallet credit, perfect for buying your next game on Steam (including DOOM 3 BFG Edition without Rift developer kit support if you still want it).
– $25 Oculus Store credit, which can be applied to future purchases at the Oculus Store including Oculus Latency Testers, new Oculus t-shirts, and more Rift development kits.
– A full refund for your pledge.

You’ll need to choose your new reward by logging into the Oculus Order Manager. Codes for the replacement rewards will be delivered in April. You’ll default to the Oculus Store credit if you don’t make a selection by April 5. Also while in the ORder Manager make sure you have an up to date address for delivery and change it if needed.

Now, since Doom 3 BFG Edition with Rift support probably will not be ready by the time the dev kits start reaching people the question what you will test the device with arises. The Oculus team suggests that the game Hawken might be ready with support for the Rift by that time, but we’ll see. Hopefully along with the Dev Kits we are also going to get access to the SDK, so even without games out to support it we could start playing with the device, though there was not word about that in the latest update.